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I will second To Kill a Mockingbird as one of my all-time favorites. I also enjoyed Ava’s Man, by Rick Bragg, set in rural Alabama. I liked As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, as well as any of Tennessee Williams’ plays. I cannot leave A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole off of this list of faves.

It sounds as though “The Angry Raisins” might have been the standard title in Japan for a while. That could explain how both Steinbeck’s widow (who has told the anecdote I mentioned) and your teacher’s friend might have seen it. Wonder how long it took to get a new translation🙂

Kat —
Thanks for the reminder about Crazy in Alabama. How can I never have read Childress his name appears on so many “best writers of the South list”? And how can I have only dipped into the work of Sams and White?

Part of the explanation for the gaps is that when I was the book editor of The Plain Dealer, I worked with many good freelancers who had a strong interest in Southern literature. So often instead of reviewing novels from the region myself, I’d assign them out.

Regarding Childress, any writer who can tell the story of a woman carrying a human head around in a tupperware bowl and make it seem like a reasonable, logical course of action for that person in that situation has some real characterization skills!

I’ve been mulling this over, and I keep thinking of other instances in southern folklore and humor where a dead body becomes a character in the narrative. (I mentally excluded stories with ghost characters – which are countless – and limited my thinking to stories with actual corpses.) Examples: the folktale “Old Dry Frye” which is both very funny and very morbid; the tale called “Sitting Up With the Dead” or some variant of that title, which is really an extended joke. Most of these have been collected in the written record, but originated as oral traditions. So I can’t say if Childress was influenced by Faulkner, or if it’s more a case of both of them being influenced by the oral tradition of the south. This would make a great topic for a dissertation.

“A great topic for a dissertation”: Yes! Even teenage reluctant readers might enjoy reading some of these books or stories because they are so fascinated right now by the intersection of the realms of the living and dead, as in the “Twilight” series.